Personally, I'm not real happy with the demise of the Google Group/Mailing list. Mailing lists + gmail = the most efficient web-based boards in the world. Everything about using discussion boards like these is akin to moving underwater or in heavy gravity-- it's all so SLOW and takes too much time. Not to mention that the population here is so small (of course bulletin boards suffer as they get larger so I should be careful what I wish for). In my experience, bulletin boards succeed only when they become a kind of primary home for the participants.

The beauty of the list was that it was a great resource I could participate in with low overhead (philosophically and literally with all the cute little avatars and smileys and GUI editing), the volume was high *and* manageable, and the lack of top-down hierarchical categories meant that the good parts of posts not necessarily intended as the "meat" (for instance, many Mac-heads post quite useful info about productivity while discussing mac-centric software, many GTD concepts are hashed out in the tiniest particulars during discussions ostensibly about something else) were still easily consumed.

43Folders was just one group of many that all became "one" in my productivity folder. Now the transactional distance to partake has become that much larger (and, yes, I know about RSS feeds-- they aren't great for threaded discussions).

As you can probably tell, I view this change with real dismay and not a little sadness.